“Spotify or Tidal? – Currently I’m using Spotify premium with the 320kbps quality but the 24bit/192khz on tidal has caught my eye recently. Is the service any better? How’s the music library in comparison? And the real question, can you actually notice the different from a phone? I know the desktop has MQA (which I’ve heard mixed opinions about as well).”

Some people who have been a long tern Spotify or Tidal user might eventually tend to find advantages of the other music service and the disadvantages of the music service they’re currently using. This is actually very common. Though Spotify and Tidal are popular online music streaming service platforms, they have great in common and difference as well. In this guide, we would like to make a comparison between Spotify and Tidal to show you their differences, therefore you could make your own decision whether to switch or not.

Part 1: Introduction to Spotify and Tidal

Obviously, both Spotify and Tidal are popular online music streaming services but offer far more than streaming music. As known to all, Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video streaming service that enables you to listen to millions of songs and other content from artists all over the world. You could browse and search desired songs on Spotify for free listening, create your own playlist and station, get music recommendations from Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix, see what others are listening right now. Spotify has both Free and Premium plans. The Free Spotify plan allows you to listen to any music on any device with ads, while the Premium plan, $9.99 per month, offers ads-free and higher quality music listening. Also, the Premium Spotify plan enables you to set music from Spotify into “Off Mode”, which enables you to listen to these music on up to 3 devices offline, but you have to log in the online Spotify account every 30 days.

On the contrast, TIDAL is also a global music and entertainment platform that brings artists and fans together through unique music and content. It has over 60 million songs and over 240000 high quality music videos for worldwide users. It offers high quality music listening experience with different plans, starting from $4.99 a month.

Part 2: 10 Differences between Spotify and Tidal

What are the differences between Tidal and Spotify? To what extent should we consider switching one to another? Well, here we have collected 10 aspects of Spotify and Tidal including music catalog, music quality, subscription plan, subscribers, audiophile, and so on.

1. Spotity vs. Tidal – Catalog

Spotify provides access to more than 40 million songs. As of January 2019, it had 200 million monthly active users, including 87 million paying subscribers. On the other hand, as mentioned above, TIDAL has over 60 million songs in catalog and over 240,000 high quality videos, along with high resolution video, and expertly curated editorial content.

2. Tidal Bitrate vs. Spotify – Sound Quality

Up until now, Spotify has compressed audio down to a bitrate of 160 kbps on desktop or 96 kbps on mobile devices — Spotify calls this rate “normal.” Paid subscribers also have a “high quality” option of 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis audio on desktop. High-fidelity or lossless audio has a significantly higher bitrate of 1,411 kbps, which is exactly provided to premium users by Tidal, with 320 kbps AAC (Premium) / 1411 kbps FLAC/ALAC (HiFi) respectively.

3. Spotify vs. Tidal – Subscription Plans

Currently, Spotify mainly offers 2 plans: Free and Premium. The Premium plan is $9.99 a month. Also, there are promotion commercials that might offer Student plan at $4.99 per month, and $14.99 per month of Family plan for 6 family members. On the other hand, Tidal has Free trial version for 30 days, Family plan, Military Plan, Student plan and Premium plan. the Premium plan offerings are $9.99 per month for Premium Tidal and $19.99 per month for Tidal HiFi plan. The Family plan of Tidal costs respectively at $14.99 for Premium and $29.99 for HiFi per month for in total 5 family members. The Student plan is $4.99 and $9.99 per month for Premim and HiFI plans respectively. And the Military plan is available at $5.99 and $11.99 per month for Premium and HiFi users respectively.

4.Spotify vs. Tidal – Subscription Plans

Tidal has claimed to have over 3 million subscribers, although the veracity of those claims as well as their reported streaming numbers have been questioned. As a contrast, as of January 2019, Spoify had 200 million monthly active users, including 87 million paying subscribers.

5.Tidal vs Spotify Curated Playlists

TIDAL makes a big deal about curated playlists from artists and music journalists, but this is not something exclusive to TIDAL. Spotify also offers a lot of curated playlists from insiders, publications and from music-savvy regular users. Spotify also offers Daily Mixes based on your listening habits. You can import your Spotify playlists to TIDAL if you want to bring the playlists you’ve spent time making on Spotify or even on other services.

6. Spotify vs. Tidal – HD Music Videos & Exclusive Tracks

7. Spotify vs. Tidal – Exclusive Tracks

TIDAL artists have not removed music from YouTube or VIMEO to put it behind a paywall, but new music videos are showing up exclusively on TIDAL for a period. Typically within hours, the new music video is also on YouTube from someone who downloaded the file. Spotify does offer some Spotify Sessions that may be similar to some of the content, but it doesn’t compare to the level that TIDAL goes with names like Jay-Z, Rhianna, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj and others.

8. Tidal vs. Spotify – Discovering New Music

Discovering new music is important to music fans that would like to explore new sounds. Spotify offers some music discovering services like Discover Weekly playlist, Release Radar, and Daily Mix. These music discovering services help Spotify users easily discover new tracks for recommendation. Meanwhile, you could search and browse new tracks through genre, artist, etc. Tidal also has its own way to work out. It provides curated playlists, tracks, recommended hi-fi albums as well as top 20 charts and staff picks based on editorial slant. You can’t search music by genre, but there is a Genres button you can press on in the sidebar which will take you to curated areas with playlists and recommended albums.

9. Tidal vs. Spotify – Social Feature

Good social features make music service special. You can connect Tidal to Facebook which will allows you to share music with your friends or extract a URL if you want to link someone to any album, playlist or track. On Spotify, you could also share Spotify song, album or even playlist through social network like YouTube or Facebook.

10. Tidal vs. Spotify – Availability and Compatibility

Tidal currently operates in 53 countries, while Spotify is by far available in 78 countries and areas. Meanwhile, Spotify app is now available in Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS, while Tidal is also available on these devices.

Part 3: How to Download Spotify Music For Free with Prof. DRM

As mentioned above, Tidal offers high audio quality for music fans compared to Spotify does. Some people therefore may want to switch from Spotify to Tidal but still keep their playlist or tracks from Spotify. That’s to say, transfer Spotify songs to Tidal. This is not feasible directly, since Spotify encrypts its music with DRM protection, but Leawo Prof. DRM would help you.

Leawo’s Prof. DRM is a kind of Spotify song downloader program that could remove the DRM protection upon Spotify songs and playlist, then download and convert Spotify music to MP3, AAC, M4A, etc. for any purpose like sharing or uploading to other music streaming services. You could also adjust audio channel, bit rate, and sample rate of Spotify songs before downloading and converting Spotify songs as you need.

Download and install Leawo Prof. DRM on your computer. And then follow the below steps to learn how to download Spotify songs for Tidal uploading.

Note: Install Spotify on computer if you want to add music from Spotify desktop or make sure Internet connection is well established.

Step 1: Add Spotify music to Prof. DRM

Launch Leawo Prof. DRM and it will lead you to launch Spotify. Then directly drag and drop songs or albums from Spotify desktop software on your computer to Leawo Prof. DRM.

You could also add Spotify music playlist to Leawo Prof. DRM for downloading. Open Spotify web player, and copy the URL of Spotify playlist. Then, on Leawo Prof. DRM, open the Converted tab to click the Spotify icon, and then paste the playlist URL into the browser bar. And then click the “OK” button.

Step 2: Set output format and audio parameters

Then click the pencil icon in each loaded Spotify music title to set output format and audio parameters. Choose output audio format and change the Channel, Sample rate, and Bit rate respectively according to Tidal requirements. MP3 is recommended. Click either “Apply to All” or “Apply to current” button to save these settings. “Apply to All” is recommended for time saving.

Step 3: Set output directory

Then, at the bottom of this program, set output directory in the “Output” box.

Step 4: Start to download and convert Spotify music

Now click on the blue button “Convert” at the bottom right corner to start to download and convert Spotify songs.

This Spotify music downloader program would then start to downloading Spotify songs immediately, with DRM removal happening in the background. You could view all downloaded Spotify songs on the “Converted” tab. After downloading, you could upload downloaded Spotify songs to Tidal.

With Leawo Prof. DRM, you could easily download Spotify songs for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, etc. without upgrading to Spotify Premium plan, which costs you $9.99 per month.

Part 4: How to Sync or Transfer Downloaded Spotify Music to Tidal

Then you only need to upload downloaded Spotify songs to Tidal for sharing. How? Actually it’s very simple. You only need to firstly upload Spotify music to TuneCore, and then TuneCore would send your music to Tidal.

Follow the below steps to learn how to sync or transfer downloaded Spotify music to Tidal:

1. Log in tunecore.com with your account and password. Create one if you have none.

2. On your Dashboard, you’ll see the options for music distribution: Album Distribution, Single Distribution, or Ringtone Distribution.

3. Select the product you want and click the blue “START HERE” button.

4. On the “Create An Album” page, fill in the required release information

5. And then click “CREATE MY ALBUM” at the bottom.

6. Once you’ve created your album, you can upload your songs, artwork, and add stores.

7. To upload your audio files, click the UPLOAD button that appears once you save the track information.

8. To select Tidal for your release, click ADD STORES in your checklist, and the DELIVER HERE box next to choose Tidal.

Once the uploading finishes, you could then view your songs on Tidal. It would be quite easy. You could even get paid for the uploads if these are your own songs.